About 2 years ago I bought a bunch of film that I planned on using for a project. I opened all of the film up and notched the cartridges during the prep process before the shoot. Long story short, I never shot the rolls and just put them back in the box with the intention of never using them again. Recently, I found these old rolls and used some of them to test out my new camera. I shot a roll of 500T and a roll of 50D, and both came back pretty washed out. So my question is (and mainly for the 50D roll), is this washed out look do to the old film or because I overexposed the film during shooting, or maybe even a combo of both? When I shoot on 50D, I try to over expose by one stop.

they both were log transfers.

Steve

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About 2 years ago I bought a bunch of film that I planned on using for a project. I opened all of the film up and notched the cartridges during the prep process before the shoot. Long story short, I never shot the rolls and just put them back in the box with the intention of never using them again. Recently, I found these old rolls and used some of them to test out my new camera. I shot a roll of 500T and a roll of 50D, and both came back pretty washed out. So my question is (and mainly for the 50D roll), is this washed out look do to the old film or because I overexposed the film during shooting, or maybe even a combo of both? When I shoot on 50D, I try to over expose by one stop.

they both were log transfers.

Steve

Hi Steve,
I think they look fairly normal for a film scan as they are in LOG space. I applied a LogC to REC709 LUT + exposure and saturation tweak and came up with this quickly. Color might be a little bit faded, or it could be that I used a LUT designed for an Arri Alexa, and not film negative. But I think all is sort of ok.

That is what a log transfer should look like. Bruce did a nice job grading it for you, and it's not too hard to do yourself in Davinci Resolve (which is free) or even Adobe Premiere. But if you'd prefer to have someone else handle it, I'm sure the lab that scanned your film could do it for a fee as well.

But yeah, you'll save a lot of money by doing it yourself. And it's fun to see your footage come to life at your fingertips!

I've gotten back a few log transfers in the past, and I was expecting the flat color and contrast. I just thought that it had looked a bit washed out compared to the last, and I didn't know if that was indicative to the old film (that was taken care of during storage). I'm glad that I posted though as I can see that I was missing out with how great LUTs are to work with. In the past I've used MB Looks for grading... but after Bruce's post, I've been playing with LUT's all last night and parts of today. I bought a small package, and I must say - i'm loving their looks

There's also a bunch of LUTs that come with the free version of Resolve. The Arri LogC to Rec709 LUT works pretty well, but you can also just make an aggressive S-curve for contrast and add some saturation to get back to a normal looking image.